Our Philosophy
Glioblastoma (GBM) exists as one of the most therapeutically intractable and lethal human cancers. While current glioma models excel at elucidating specific reductionist views of cancer biology, they largely fail in therapeutic screening due to their inability to capture the multifaceted and patient-specific nature of human cancers.
Cancer, however, is not a cell-autonomous disease, but rather one involving complex interactions within its microenvironment and the broader organism.
Our laboratory believes that the next generation of preclinical tumor models will need to be highly contextualized based on the specific tumor type and biological and clinical phenotypes unique to host variables.
Our Approach
Our GBM models must capture this complexity by incorporating the genomic, epigenomic, and transcriptomic heterogeneity of tumors, along with the unique characteristics of the human brain microenvironment, while still being suitable for high-throughput assays.
To address limitations with current preclinical glioblastoma (GBM) models, our laboratory utilizes ‘‘GLICO’’ (cerebral organoid glioma) models to retro-engineer patient-specific GBMs using patient-derived glioma stem cells and human cerebral organoids.
Our research exists at the intersection of cancer neuroscience, developmental and stem-cell biology, functional genomics, immunology, and computational modeling. We study how malignant cell states and interactions with the surrounding brain jointly determine tumor behavior, with the goal of identifying therapeutic dependencies that remain consequential as the disease changes. As such, the laboratory is a collaborative research environment for scientists interested in questions at the intersection of cancer, neuroscience, and disease modeling. We welcome investigators who bring depth in their own discipline and want to help build the connections between molecular events, cellular behavior, and the organization of a living tumor.
Meet Our Team
The Fine laboratory allows outstanding exposure to and potential involvement in all aspects of translational science and precision medicine while exploring basic mechanistic studies of tumorigenesis using a combination of molecular and computational biology approaches.
Our Research
Our lab is a 2017 recipient of the NIH Directors Pioneer Award, and is a rapidly growing program/laboratory benefitting from exceptional resources, scientific freedom and extraordinary local environment of world-renowned cancer biologists. Our largest and most rapidly growing area of interests are focused in the neuroscience of embryonic stem cell-derived cerebral organoids interfaced with tumor stem cell biology.
Interested in Collaborating?
We pursue collaborations that bring complementary biological insight, experimental capabilities, or quantitative methods to a defined question in glioblastoma. The laboratory’s contribution is a research program spanning patient-derived tumor systems, human brain microenvironments, cellular-state biology, and longitudinal functional analysis. We are particularly interested in problems for which tumor–host interactions may change the mechanism or therapeutic consequence inferred from an isolated-cell assay.